Plugin Force Model
The Ansys Orbit Determination Tool Kit (ODTK®) application provides two force model plugin points for the customization of the accelerations used in the propagation of the satellite trajectory. One point is an HPOP plugin and the other an SRP Reflectance Model. Typical uses of the force model plugin are to implement satellite specific solar pressure, drag, and lift models.
You may write plugins in a number of languages, including Perl, VB script, C++, C#, and Visual Basic.NET.
The Plugin attribute has the following subattributes:
| Force Model Plugin Options | |
|---|---|
| Option | Description |
| Use | Set this to true to use the Plugin model. |
| PluginID | Select the desired plugin from the shortcut menu list. |
| PluginConfig | When you set the PluginID and click in the Object Properties window, one or more subattributes will appear, enabling you to configure parameters that depend on the selected plugin. |
See ODTK Plugins for further information.
Plugin registration
.NET components
From the command line, you must register each assembly using RegAsm.exe. To do this, you need certain DLLs to be present on your computer. You can obtain these by building a plugin; the build process produces these DLLs from AGI-supplied DLLs located in the bin directory of the install. These DLLs are named Interop.Agi.<name>.dll. If you cannot do a build to produce these DLLs, you can obtain them from AGI customer support at www.agi.com.
Next, cd to the directory where the DLLs are present.
Then execute the following lines:
[DIR]\RegAsm.exe /codebase Agi.As.Hpop.FrcMdl.Plugin.VB_Net.Examples.dll
[DIR]\RegAsm.exe /codebase Agi.As.Hpop.FrcMdl.Srp.Plugin.CSharp.Examples.dll
where [DIR] is the directory where RegAsm.exe is located, possibly C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322.
You will see a warning about possible interference of the assembly name with other assemblies. In deciding whether or not to proceed despite this warning, bear in mind that the assembly name begins with "Agi.", which should minimize the chance of interference. If in doubt, please check with your system administrator or contact AGI technical support.
WSC components
From the command line, register each WSC file using regsvr32.exe.
First, cd in to the directory where the .wsc file
is located. Then execute:
regsvr32.exe Perl.Example2.Hpop.wsc
You must take an additional registration step for your component to show up as being selectable in the UI. This registration associates your plugin with a plugin category. There is a sample registration file in each of the CodeSamples\...\WSC folders that shows how to register for a particular plugin point.
Regsvr32.exe requires administrator rights in order to register a plugin. Once registered, it's available to all users on that machine, provided that the actual file location on the disk does not change. It's sometimes difficult to find a system administrator to register the plugin though. In this case, we have provided a VBScript utility "register_wsc_hkcu.vbs" located in your install under <Install_Dir>\CodeSamples\Extend. The utility will register a Windows Script Component to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER area of the Windows registry rather than HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. To run the utility, open up a command prompt and change directories to the location of the utility. Then enter:
cscript register_wsc_hkcu.vbs "Your WSC Name.wsc"
replacing "Your WSC Name.wsc" with the actual full path to the location of your Windows Script Component (WSC) file. The utility will parse your WSC file and make the appropriate entries into the Windows registry. Each user who wants to use the plugin must run this utility on the machine.